At 5:58 AM -0600 1/24/97, Jonathan Robie wrote:
>OK, I'm moving on to the next chapter! In Ephesians 2:1, hUMAS is
accusative:
>
>Eph 2:1 (GNT) KAI hUMAS ONTAS NEKROUS TOIS PARAPTWMASIN KAI TAIS
hAMARTIAIS
>hUMWN
>
>What is the force of this accusative? Is it an accusative of respect?
>Wallace claims that the accusative of respect "is rare enough in the
NT that
>this should be employed as a last resort--that is, only after other
>categories are exhausted," but I don't see what else it could be.
Jonathan: check the archives for the early part of the "Accusative
Absolute" chain and you'll see a discussion of this passage. I have not
tried to hide my feelings about the style of this tractate/letter: to
call it loose is an understatement. I think that 2:1-5 (+ ...) is an
anacoluthon; the writer begins in 2:1 with that accusative phrase you
have cited, intending even then, I believe, to complete it with what we
finally find in 2:5: KAI ONTAS hHMAS NEKROUS EN TOIS PARAPTWMASIN
SUNEZWOPOIHSEN TWi CRISTWi ... --but before he gets around to
completing his sentence, he flexes his rhetorical muscles and adds a
rough half dozen additional clauses/phrases in a sort of Faulknerian
"free-association" pattern (I'm thinking of The Sound and the
Fury) and then, since he realizes that the original object has
been left way behind, he repeats it--BUT--this time he includes himself
among those who were dead in their sins but made alive with Christ,
putting down hHMAS--"us" in place of the original hUMAS, "you."
It seems to me that the identity of the opening phrases in 2:1 and 2:5
in all respects apart from the accusative personal pronoun makes it
clear that SUNEZWOPOIHSEN TWi CRISTWi is the intended verb taking that
accusative as a direct object. There will, no doubt, still be those who
want to call it an "accusative absolute" simply because its verb is so
far removed and they want to tag every word in terms of its clearest
syntactical link. But the whole sequence of 2:1-2:5 makes it abundantly
clear what's going on.
The accusative of respect, at least in traditional grammatical
terminology, tends to be used of accusatives qualifying adjectives or
verbs denoting a state to denote a thing in respect to
which the verb or adjective is limited (Smyth, #1601);
Wallace seems to be using the term in an idiosyncratic sense including
limiting functions of an accusative noun that can't be explained
otherwise. But Ephesians 2:1 hUMAS ONTAS KTL. is not an accusative of
respect.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/